


Romance Dawn On Ravenser Odd

by Fezgician, nvzblgrrl



Series: The Big Fat One Piece Fic Project [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Original Plot, POV Alternating, Self-Insert, it's West Blue baby there ain't no rules, original islands, we're going full in on the OCs here for a long long while
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28329093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fezgician/pseuds/Fezgician, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nvzblgrrl/pseuds/nvzblgrrl
Summary: Or: How I Learned How To Stop Being Embarrassed And Love My OCs.Feat. a fic writer being rescued by someone they could have sworn they made up years ago, on an island they made up about five years after that for a completely different project, and a whole mess of people and things that they're pretty sure weren't in any draft of any other story that didn't go anywhere either... and a teenage girl who's honestly trying her best despite having no idea what's wrong with this stranger.
Relationships: Original Character(s) & Original Character(s)
Series: The Big Fat One Piece Fic Project [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2074596
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. A Sort of Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first chapter of my new One Piece fic.  
> For ye who have been following my tumblr (same username as here, i'm nvzblgrrl everywhere), you may have noticed The Big Fat One Piece Fic Project tag and the mess of art and attached character notes that has been getting posted every so often.  
> For those of you who haven’t - because you’ve been following me for my other One Piece fics, thought the description looked interesting, or just wandered in looking for the restroom -, basically the situation was -  
> \- Me: Gosh, I’ve been in the One Piece fandom for how many years now? Like, a decade? How many fics and OCs have I made in that time?  
> \- My computer, blog, my unending memory of things that embarrass me: Too many.  
> Me: Well, maybe I’ll do something with that.  
> \- FFnet: also that One Piece SI-OC focused story you’re simultaneously ashamed and proud of that you promised to rewrite like five years ago has over a quarter of a million views.  
> \- Me: OKAY, SO I WILL DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.  
> Also it's just more interesting to remodel old characters w/ interesting concepts instead of cranking out some new ones all the time… though I’m still doing the 2nd to fill out the story.

Stonecutter Island was a fairly quiet island. It’s hard for it to be much of anything else; it hadn’t seen any proper form of human inhabitation in nearly half a century, which was when a minor plague had killed off a good number of the inhabitants, chased off the survivors and a good number of their neighbors from its sister island with the grief of their loss and no small fear that they’d be next, and then continued to ward off any ideas of return with the lingering specter of sickness that had taken over all tales of the place.

That wasn’t to say it was silent _or_ empty, however. There were always sound from the winds and storms that battered the islands on a weekly basis, varying between the whisper of drizzle and a steady chill breeze to the sort of tumults that rattled windows and rafters with an intensity that was only tame by the standards of those that had spent their lives surviving the worst weather Grand Line had to offer. And then there were the birds.

Both Stonecutter and its twin Ravenser Odd were home to a great number of seafaring birds and a few others that weren’t quite as adventurous but were still fond enough of the place not to bother leaving for sunnier shores. Petrels of many different names and natures, albatrosses, sea faring ravens - for which the island Ravenser Odd might have been named at one point, though the history was long since lost to its original inhabitants, even before they’d died off -, cormorants, pelicans, pigeons, peregrines, puffins, gannets, frigatebirds, skuas, auks, skimmers, starlings, lapwings, and a frankly dazzling variety of swallows and swifts.

Once, the sister islands had been conjoined at the hip, but time, tide, and tectonic movement had gradually eased them apart, slipping a small but distinct gap between them.

This was of little object to the birds, of course, but to Meryl Dacey, who’s ability to fly was quite subjective at best and who’s ability to swim was unquestionably nil, it was something to be concerned about, because it required two particular flavors of knowledge to get around.

First, it required a sense of timing; the daily tides themselves would reveal a natural ‘bridge’ of columnar basalt and piled sand filled out by a fair bit of human intervention on a rather predictable schedule.

Second, it required one know exactly what parts of said bridge were sound ground and which were not.

Thankfully, as a long-term resident of Ravenser and a regular visitor to Stonecutter, she had both, along with the good sense not to test the edges of that knowledge too vigorously. Timing the tides might be as reliable a science as clocking the dawn and the matter of safe footing as easy as hopscotch - admittedly, hopscotch across smooth saltwater slick stone, which was a bit of a trickier business in practice -, but there was still the chance of foul weather or other intervention throwing a wrench into the works.

The crossing complete, Meryl turned her eyes and thoughts the question of where she would be going today.

Her requirements were few - a bit of peace and quiet to go with a good view of the birds. Which birds, she didn’t always care, and there wasn’t exactly a shortage of solitude on Stonecutter Island, but it was still a question that required consideration on the exclusive merit of ‘and what will it take to get there’.

Skellingar Peak, for example, was always a reliably calm and peaceful place, with an atmosphere the exact opposite of the pirate town on the other end of Ravenser, along with the added bonus of being one of her grandfather’s typical haunts, but the process of getting there was a tricky one and if her estimation of the weather conditions were correct…

Meryl looked at the scattering of trees growing on the mountain and then at the birds, just to cross-reference as she made the mental calculations again.

Hmm… no, definitely not. The wind was too strong to risk the narrow cliff paths and their near complete absence of handholds, for all that her ultimate destination would be protected from the worst of it. While she could probably catch herself if she slipped - she’d managed the trick before, just barely in time not to make that fall her last -, it wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat anytime soon.

So that left sticking to lower ground.

That wasn’t bad. It wouldn’t limit her birdwatching by much, even if it shifted the demographics of her artistic subjects a bit. And besides -

The optimistic thought cut off as a blast of freezing cold wind hit Meryl out of nowhere, physically forcing her on her heels as it nearly ripped her satchel open and whipped both her shawl and her hair into a wild frenzy of stinging threads. Immediately, she ran with the wind towards one of the few buildings still intact, ducking to the right of the doorway as soon as she was clear of it.

The house, like most of the structures on Stonecutter, was of the blackhouse style - drystone walls with cracks packed tight with dirt and sand that could stand up to the worst weather, though neglect had a way of tearing them down faster than Meryl could understand. This one, however, had held itself together well, with even the thatch roof being surprisingly complete for at least fifty years of neglect, though its absence of a proper door to shut the elements out completely was a stark reminder that it was only matter of time until the rest fell apart.

Still, it would hold long enough for one Meryl Dacey to pull herself back together in relative safety.

As soon as she had both her shivers and hammering heart back under control, she checked her satchel to make sure her art supplies were still secure - they were, despite her initial panic - and then, after letting go of that long held breath, took a look at the world outside.

Yes, not making the climb was the right choice; that same blast of wind would have done much worse than to simply ruffle her feathers on the cliffs - it would have knocked her clean off and into another impromptu flying lesson. Considering how well the last one had gone - that is to say, not at all -, she wasn’t exactly upset about dodging her remedial, unintentionally or not.

Still, for all she was safe, Meryl couldn’t quite shake the feeling that that blast of wind had been a warning, some sign that _something_ was coming. What that ‘something’ was supposed to be, she couldn’t say, but there was a feeling in her bones that said it was nothing _small_.

She pulled out her sketchbook, hoping that it would provide her some relief from the sudden anxiety thrumming through her veins, even if all she produced was random scribblings rather than any ‘proper’ art.

It did help a bit, helping wind down the tension that had seized her shoulders and chest with every scratch of the pencil on the paper.

And then she looked out at the sea again and the tension came rolling back in with the waves.

“A boat?”

“So it would appear, éinín [little bird/birdie].”

Meryl did not jump, but it was a near thing. “Garathair [great-grandfather]!” she snapped, spinning around to face her grandfather where he stood behind her, the blank eyes of his bird mask staring out at the horizon. “You _promised_ you would stop sneaking up on me!”

“Tá brón orm, gariníon [I'm sorry / literal - 'sorrow is upon me', granddaughter/adopted-daughter/niece],” he said, tilting the beak of his mask down in a nod that was more acknowledgement of the misstep rather than an apology for it. “That aside, what do you make of it?”

She looked back at the boat, adjusting her glasses as she watched the boat inch its way towards the shore. It was a small vessel - not the smallest she’d ever seen, but still a far sight smaller than most of any of those that came into the port on Ravenser Odd - with a single sail, and no visible crew.

That last detail didn’t feel right.

“People are… supposed to be on deck when the ship is coming to shore, right?” Meryl asked.

The old druid shrugged, the wild brush of his long grey hair and the bristling coat draped over his shoulders rising and falling with an astounding amount of dignity for a physical declaration of ignorance. “I wouldn’t know, though the assumption seems logical enough.”

Immediately, she felt the need to argue, to demand a proper, helpful answer from her grandfather, but…

Meryl sighed, the anger slipping away as quickly as it came.

The truth was that Grandfather Ruith probably didn’t have a better answer - of all the members of the family that had ever set to sea, he had never followed any of them and thus had no experience with what that lifestyle entailed. All he had, much like Meryl, were assumptions based on distant observation, and considering that he had been blind for the better part of forever, Meryl probably knew more about the art of sail than he did.

“I suppose there’s no way of knowing without going to look, is there?” she asked, knowing full well the answer to that question.

She flipped open her sketchbook, turning to a drawing she’d completed earlier that week - a colored pencil and ink recreation of one of the ravens that her home island had been named after, one that she had slaved over in an attempt to capture the subtle iridescence of the feathers without using the rare glittering inks Zahlia had gifted her for her last birthday.

Pressing her fingers against the page, Meryl uncurled her power carefully, threading it through her drawing slowly… and then pulled.

The bird shuddered and swelled as it shifted from two dimensions of existence to three, the texture shifting from dry paper rasp to liquid possibility and then to firm reality. As it finally pulled its claws free of the paper, it gave itself a good shake over, feathers puffing out as it adjusted to its new state of being.

Meryl knew that it was otherwise indistinguishable from her original subject. She’d taken too much time and care for it not to be.

“Alright,” she said, as much to herself as her grandfather or the bird now perched on her wrist. “Let’s see what a bird’s eye view makes of the situation.”

She threw the bird into the air, watching it take wing from two separate viewpoints - her own and that of her creation - for a dizzying moment, before it caught the wind properly and started towards the seemingly derelict ship.

It was an odd little thing to look at, compared to the vessels that populated the docks of the pirate town of Ravenspurn. It was a black-bodied sailboat, sides a bit too smooth to look properly real, with a striking red sail the only flash of bold color to be seen on it… and the only sign of movement, either.

As Meryl had suspected, there was no hand at the tiller, nor any one attending to the ropes that would keep the sail at the prime angles to catch the wind. Landing on the thin rail, she turned her bird’s head around to look at the deck. Even if she didn’t know anything in the matter of boats and rigging, there was still a sense that whoever had last been aboard this vessel had known even less than her.

Hopping down towards the ajar door leading down into the innards of the boat, Meryl peeked into the dark warily. This space was better and worse than the deck of the ship, in a way, both in the sense of looking like a person had actually lived there and the fact that the way they had lived had been messy, with things scattered across the floor as cupboard doors swung on their hinges with every passing wave.

She pushed her raven onward, each wary step taking it further into the darkened space of cabin, even as she picked her claws carefully over odd objects that were increasingly terrifying for their familiarity - a cracked pair of glasses and a heavily worn stuffed animal merely stood out as the most unique and humanly terrifying for that fact. There was no scent of decay or rot, but that didn’t mean much coming from a copy of a creature that depended on its eyes far more than anything resembling a nose -

Meryl jumped - both as herself and her puppet bird - as something long and pale flopped out of the bunk she’d been about to pass, spidery fingers weakly grasping in the bird’s direction before falling lifelessly against the floor. A head - hair half-shorn away in a messy cut that didn’t quite seem like something a person would do to themselves - lifted for a moment, fixing dark glassy eyes on her for a moment before dropping back down to the mattress.

That was no corpse. At least not yet.

“Garathair [Great-grandfather],” she said as she returned to herself, heart hammering in her chest once more. “I need your help.”

* * *

I woke up slowly, the murky mental oblivion of sleep slowly clearing as my brain went through its normal boot sequence. There was no particular push to be awake, yet, save for maybe finding a glass of water to wash the taste of ‘early morning gym sock’ off of my tongue and the beginning of a twinge in my back from laying in the same position for too long, so I just lay there as the cobwebs cleared, enjoying the sensation of a soft warm bed in the face of an outside world that was more than likely cold and miserable.

It was Michigan in December - or was it January now? Time was an illusion until I checked a calendar or my phone - and that alone was a near perfect promise of it being shitty outside, even if this winter had been generous in its lack of snow.

Probably saving it for… wait, no, if it was January, we were already past my birthday. Still, if we weren’t, that was all the more reason to savor this cushy little moment of existence while it lasted.

Of course, that meant that my brain immediately decided to interrupt it.

‘Hey.’

What.

‘There’s a problem.’

No. Absolutely not. I am trying to enjoy this peace and quiet for as long as it lasts, you son of a-

Skipping right over my desire to not think or have to stress about anything for five minutes, my brain continued. ‘Did you notice that this place smells wrong?’

Well, I’ve noticed it _now_. And not in the usual way that things end up smelling wrong at my house either.

There was no fresh stench of biological mishap or even the crawling ick-fog of some outside event like someone burning trash down the road. This was… the kind of smell I hadn’t experienced in decades; the musty scent of neglect.

Fine. That was enough to justify getting up and figuring out what was going on.

I opened my eyes to find an unfamiliar ceiling cast in the murky grey light of an overcast winter morning - wood panels supported by thicker wood beams. For a moment, I could have mistaken it for the family room of my own house, but… no. Even without my glasses and for all that it looked to be the same kind of cedar in the same color finish, I could still that the height and width of the ceiling was too different, as were what I could see of the walls.

There was also the fact that the only bed in the family room belonged to my dog and that it was inside a dog crate that had never quite managed to stop smelling like leaky nervous canine.

This room might have been a lot of things I didn’t know much about yet, but it not having the rank stink of dog piss hanging around was already a very solid point in its favor.

I pulled myself out of the bed carefully and with no small amount of regret, not just because the air was chill and the floor was freezing against my poor naked feet, but because my back was already snapping and popping at me for daring to move.

One good thing about the cold though - now my brain was fully awake and firing on full cylinders.

Alright. I was in a room. Treat it like a locked room mystery. What did I have to work with? Besides the increasingly convoluted terms and conditions of my existence.

I had my clothes. Clothes I recognized as my own, though I couldn’t quite remember if I’d been wearing them the last time I’d been awake. They certainly felt like I’d spent a lot of time sleeping in them, but that didn’t prove anything except that I’d gotten behind on laundry again and that I hadn’t changed my habit of ‘not actually using these pockets for anything’ any time recently.

But worse is what a search of the room turned up - namely, ‘a whole lotta nadda’.

My glasses were nowhere to be found, the contents of the furniture - which, while really nicely made, was also obviously not used that much - tapped out at linens, blankets, and the sort of general goods that got shoved in those sort of places as an afterthought. A few loose knickknacks, a handful of foreign coins that probably had a net value approximately equal to a cup of Chuck E. Cheese token, a couple journals that I decoded enough of the scrabbley handwriting from to realize they wouldn’t be doing me a whole lot of good.

More interesting, but just as useless - I’d even checked behind the frames just to be sure -, was the décor.

All of the pictures on the wall - and there were a lot - were sketches of birds; detailed ones, often capturing the subject in flight, the kind of stuff that I expected to see as samples from a Victorian nature guide or something in a similar vein, and with signatures that seemed to indicate that this was the work of only one or two different artists. Not the worst shit I’d ever seen, if one had to operate on a scale of ‘tasteless white people kitsch’ to ‘something out of a horror movie’ - on second thought, that scale might have needed more thinking on, given that there was a lot of overlap between those two categories by default -, but I was still getting vibes from this that I didn’t like at all.

On the other hand, my brain was hardwired to favor paranoia and anxiety as a survival tactic, so maybe I was reading too much into it.

Something to consider later, I thought as I pulled down a curtain rod, stripping it of the simple fabric that had blocked out a second story view of a sheer cliff face of dark, harshly cleaved stone and some kind of evergreens behind whatever building I was in.

I’d discounted the window as a potential escape route early on - I’d never been a great climber, between my fear of heights and physical disabilities, and without any sign of a landing space, I didn’t trust my legs not to snap like twigs if I made the attempt. Besides, my joints already hated me enough without heaping that kind of abuse on top of them.

Turning to the door, I turned my thoughts on how to get past the damn thing. The hinges were on the outside, so it wasn’t like I could go to the step of attacking those, though depending on the quality of the wood, I probably could try kicking the damn thing down - but that was a last resort, because it’d be impossible to cover up the noise or my going once I’d done that.

Too bad my pockets had been empty. The door knob looked to be of an old enough style that a simple jimmy with credit card would work, unless there was a deadlock on the other side…

As I pressed my body against the door to get a sense for its strength, there was a squeak of unoiled metal and the moment of perfect horror as something one presumed a stable surface gave away under my weight. I managed to catch myself as the door swung open, only looking like a mild fool stumbling around in the dark after a stupid assumption rather than a complete idiot with a face full of broken teeth from kissing the floor at high speed.

“Alright, that part _will_ be funny once this is over,” I muttered as I pulled myself back together, slipping out my anxiety and back into the no-frills mentality I needed for this.

The hallways I was in wasn’t all that different from the room - the wood paneled walls were covered with framed pictures of birds I couldn’t hope to identify, the floor the same cold wood save for the faded woven carpet that ran down the center of the space, and the ceiling near the same height. There was a difference in lighting, though, that served to change the character of those things immensely; the window at the end of the hall was too small to cast more than a faint glow in the gloom, increasing the sense of neglect I’d begun picking up in the room while also casting eerie shadows across the floor.

That was fine. My eyes were better suited for the dark anyway, even if they still weren’t much good at fine details at the moment. The casting of the shadows in the direction I wanted to be not-noticed in was less so, but again, it’d be livable for the next few minutes.

What _wasn’t_ livable was the crawling sensation running up my spine that said I was already being watched.

I stepped carefully down the hall, easing back into old habits of perfectly silent walking as though I’d never left; putting my weight on the ball of my foot first and then easing the heel down, keeping my breaths and movements as slow and smooth as possible with my clunky joints, sticking as close to the wall as I could because that’s where the floorboards would be the least creaky. It was easy, without shoes, and I hadn’t had any sense of this house being a bustle of any kind of activity that could get me noticed but I knew better than to let either of those things make me too careless.

The hall opened up into what looked like… like a balcony overlooking the main hall of some grand manor. Or maybe even a mediocre one; I’d only ever seen them in movies and it wasn’t like it was that weird a design choice if I took the time to pick at my immediate reaction.

Whatever it was, it was obvious that this part of the house was older than the section I’d been housed in, because the wood paneling only followed the wall on my level, giving away to stone for the first story’s walls and floor. Looking up not just revealed a chandelier I could just make out as being made of interlocking antlers, but a high ceiling supported by an interlocking web of rafters and trusses that looked to be the perfect perch for bats or birds… if they could have entered the building in the first place.

Considering the vibes I’d been getting since I’d woken up and the fact that I wasn’t close enough to the lower floor to check for any telltale signs of shit, I wasn’t entirely sure they couldn’t.

Whatever case could be made for the absence or presence of real birds, there were certainly enough fake ones around. The framed pictures mounted on the wood paneled walls were now joined by three-dimensional models carved from wood and winged figures woven into age faded tapestry.

“ _Really_ not liking these Bates Motel vibes,” I quietly informed the figure of an owl with wide-spread wings and glass orb eyes as I passed under it, making my way towards the stairs.

It did not reply, instead dutifully staring me down like the intruder I was in this place.

Fair enough.

As I crept down the stairs to the main foyer - I wasn’t really looking forward to finding out if the stone was going to be colder than the wood, even if I was pretty sure that the door out of this place was on the other side of it -, I happened to look sideways at one of the framed drawings. Unlike the more technically perfect ones I’d taken note of and dismissed before, this one was clearly a child’s drawing; abstract, bright, and scrawling in a way that was infinitely more interesting than something that was a few shades off of being a photo-accurate reproduction. There was still a measure of care in it that said this kid just loved birds and had watched enough of them to learn how to make the proportions and pose look fairly accurate to the spirit, if not the reality of one, but other than that, it was just obviously the product of fun and a desire to create.

And, despite that lack of technical skill, despite that this was clearly the work of a child who could have so easily forgotten this drawing even existed by the next week, someone had taken the time to frame it with all the care and respect that had been given to all the other drawings on the wall.

That was enough to tell me that this home had been loved once. I’d never seen the art of an amateur honored in a home that wasn’t.

And now this place was just a haunted shell of that. Not dead, not quite, but… getting there. Like a fading ghost going through familiar motions without having the body to make those motions mean anything more than a reminder of what it once was.

Somehow that made me trust this place even less than the creepy bird statues had.

Trying not to jump as I touched the stone floor - just as cold as I’d expected, but there was no way to ignore the needle sharp stab of that cold through my joints -, I took a minute to snoop. No stray shoes to steal, no coats I could find… but the door I’d assumed to be an exit was exactly that, if the coldness I could feel seeping through the narrow gaps of its frame was any sign.

Good.

I went to grab the handle, started to pull… and immediately stumbled backwards as someone on the other side pushed.

If I’d been smart, if I’d been lucky, I would have managed to stay hidden behind the door. Maybe been slammed into the wall, but I’d have gladly taken a lump or two for a few more seconds of not being seen by anyone. Hell, even turning heel and running the moment that door began to creak would have been an improvement.

I hadn’t been lucky. I hadn’t been smart. I hadn’t even been quick. What I had was an ass on the floor and a piercing pain in my head from the sudden brightness my poor photosensitive eyes had just been exposed to.

“Oh, you’re awake! Are you alright?” someone - the person who knocked me down? - asked.

Did I _look_ alright? Did squinting in the face of the accursed daystar look like ‘alright’ behavior? Did not having shoes in this freezer of a house look -

Shutting off that train of increasing irritation, I answered, “I’m fine,” even as I turned my attention to the process of pulling myself back up to my feet.

It was too bad that my voice was so tight that the lie should have been immediately obvious, but the fact that each clumsy and awkward movement was also a combination of painful and exhausting was enough to make me angry - at myself, at the situation, at every misfortune that had left its mark on everything I had to do just to get through the day - and there was no way I could disguise it as anything more than a lesser form of that. “I was just leaving-”

Small hands - not that small, but small enough after years of being manhandled by big ones - immediately locked around my wrist and started to drag me backwards into the dark. “You can’t!”

“ _Excuse_ me? I am not your hostage-” I snapped back, already scrambling to twist free of that hold.

“You’re sick! You can’t leave until you’re better!”

“No, I’m not!” I’m a cripple. That’s a completely different animal. “And I am leaving _right_ now.”

“You can’t! There’s pirates down there!”

That brought me up short.

Pirates?

I turned to look at my ‘rescuer’ properly, my eyes finally adjusted enough to allow me to see something of the world around me.

They were smaller than me - not by a lot, but enough that I had to tilt my head down to make eye contact - with a mess of grey-brown hair that someone with a better grasp of exact colors would probably call ‘taupe’ threatening to explode out of the ribbon holding it back in a ponytail and a pair of round glasses that did nothing to disguise the deep molten pink eyes staring at me. The fishnet sleeves poking out from under the layers of woolen shawl were just the last nail on the coffin.

“Who are you?” I asked, already dreading the answer I had a feeling was coming. This wasn’t the face of a stranger, for all I’d never seen it in real life.

The kid with the impossible eyes smiled at me, the clear panic melting away like ice in a bowl of hot water. “My name is Meryl. Meryl Dacey.”

Oh good. That was exactly as close to my first Mary Sue’s name as I was expecting it to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few questions that I figured some people would ask or have asked in the reviews of the older fics after I posted the first update regarding this-
> 
> Question: Who’s Meryl Dacey?  
> Answer: My first Mary Sue, originally named Merle, in the sense of being my first character who was designed for wish-fulfillment purposes, which in my case was ‘I’d like to have a power suited towards my skills and then be treated tenderly by my favorite character’. Mostly her ‘role’ in her original story was to meet Brook (both regular and boneless varieties - it made more sense in context), go through a sickfic arc as the caregiver, then go through a sickfic arc as the sick person, ???, and then profit. The Straw Hats were also there, for some reason, probably for some kind of drama or just so someone with actual medical skills could keep people from dying.  
> Look, I was like 16.  
> Anyway, Meryl came from that and my interest in my Irish heritage (which is a slightly loaded topic to talk about now because fuck you white supremacists), which is where she picked up the language (which I do not speak, not when I was 16 and not now - I sample a variety of phrasebooks and will try to avoid overusing the language, yes I feel bad about this) and the druid ‘grandfather’. Yes, that’s in quotes for a reason. It’s not a huge mystery but it is something I’ll be playing with for a bit with her character and I’m sure a lot of you will parse it out the general shape of it before too long.
> 
> Question: Isn’t this project really ambitious? Are you sure you can handle this?  
> Answer: Yes! And no. Nothing in life is certain and asking me if I’m ‘sure’ of anything is a pretty good way to start me second guessing myself. I’ve also had a couple rough years of mental health stuff - which is perfectly normal and acceptable when you’re finally unpacking decades worth of emotional baggage, combined with external stress factors (of which I am sure that most of you are familiar with from first-hand experience this last year).  
> However, I have spent all of 2020 planning and prepping for this. Not constantly, but consistently. I have a writing partner who has been assisting me greatly on this (she's got co-writer credit), even if One Piece isn’t a major fandom for her, and have plotted out quite a few arcs in advance, which was something I did not do with a number of my older projects.  
> So I think that I’m starting out from a pretty good starting line.
> 
> Question: You’re working with someone? Who is she?  
> Answer: My friend Monica, who can be found at Fezgician on tumblr and here. Her One Piece experience is limited to two arcs, but she’s got a higher quantity of common sense and has an excellent sense for story flow. She helped me visually redesign a lot of the main OC cast, along with helping me design a lot of the new characters that’ll be filling out the setting, and I’d even say that there’s a couple of my older OCs that are more her characters now for how much she’s done to build them up.  
> She’s also been the main driving force for a few arcs, the biggest of which happen to be quite a way’s down the line, but her impact can be felt pretty early as well - you’ll be seeing them within a few chapters, most likely.
> 
> Question: How regular are updates going to be on this?  
> Answer: I am hoping that updates will be regular, but knowing myself, I can’t make any promises, though I have been working on plotting and planning with Monica's help.  
> That part is fairly far ahead of where I am currently, so I’m optimistic that if writer’s block or other issues hit, there will be something of a buffer between me and running out of material.
> 
> Question: How far ahead do you have planned?  
> Answer: I have quite a lot of story mapped out. Not too tightly and there’s a few gaps still waiting to be filled, which leaves room for me to make discoveries along the way, but I do have a fairly good bit of the story from the start (which is in West Blue and spends quite a bit of time exploring there before heading to the Grand Line) to Sabaody sketched out.
> 
> Question: Are there going to be multiple fics for this ‘project’ then?  
> Answer: Yep! There’s some of my older fics that simply wouldn’t mix in with the bigger concept, thanks to irreconcilable differences in geographic or timeline, such as being set in a different one of the Blues or taking place during Brook’s pre-Rumbar days, so those ones will be split off into their own things. They won’t be seen for a while though, since I’ve been focusing my energies here. There might be some characters that appear in more than one though. Just a little something to keep an eye on.
> 
> I'm trying to learn HTML to make the non-English word use less obtrusive. It's just hard.
> 
> Anyway, if there are any other questions or comments (ex: regarding formatting choices), feel free to leave them in the reviews and I’ll try to answer them in the next Author’s Notes.


	2. I Don't Know You And You Don't Know The Half Of It

I'd had a lot of theories as to how I'd gotten into this situation. Kidnapping, a particularly bad dissociative episode putting me in some kind of weird recovery center, really weird dream that I just happened to be experiencing a little more lucidly than normal…

But being 'rescued' from an unsettlingly vague situation by a character I'd cooked up at sixteen for no better purpose than wanting a little bit of wish fulfillment hadn't exactly been on the list.

Yet here I was, staring down that very person as she poured me a cup of hot leaf water.

The tea set, I noted dully, was ceramic, the pot - round, squat, and almost unnaturally smooth all the way around - done up in a brown glaze that melted from chocolate to caramel in a way that was nearly watercolor in effect while the companion cups varied in both style and color. Not by a lot, but enough to make it clear they'd come from different sources at different times… or at least, that their shared tea set was one made by an imperfect artisan rather than mass production.

Somehow, that detail was reassuring. Nothing quite unsettled like 'perfect'.

"Do you take it plain or…?" Meryl asked.

"Straight is fine," I finally managed, my voice coming out as a faint croak. It wasn't like I'd drank enough tea in my life to have a preference in its preparation or serving.

The girl nodded, quickly moving through the motions before handing me the taller of the two teacups she'd brought - a tall, handle-less cylinder of slightly lumpy ceramic that reminded me of a Japanese-style cup a long since exed best friend had once pushed into my hands almost ten years ago, insisting that the milky chamomile tea would help relax me.

It hadn't really, really, it'd done the opposite, but it had been… alright when I'd been drinking it. Hopefully this would be as well.

I took a small sip and made an effort not to physically react to the taste. Whatever kind of tea this was, it wasn't either of the kinds I'd had before. It was stronger and had a hint of spiciness to it that actually worked in its favor - not quite like cinnamon, but close enough for me to find something I could latch onto as a clear point of enjoyment.

With a bit of milk and honey, it'd probably be even better.

Taking another sip as the cup warmed my hands, I turned my mind from the past to the present… and the matter of studying one Meryl Dacey.

She looked a lot like me - not as I was now, no, but a me over ten years in the past; the same general body shape and facial features, but shorter and softer around the edges, with a thick mess hair just barely being held back from exploding by the efforts of a single ribbon and a sense of fashion that was about as close to Hot Topic as you could get from the local Good Will - I would know, given that I had that exact same shirt bunched up in a laundry hamper back home.

Of course, it wasn't a perfect resemblance, even without the age gap being taken into consideration. Her hair was an ashy shade of greyish-brown - or was it more of a brownish-grey? - that was both lighter than my natural color and duller than the rainbow sherbet stripes I'd thrown on after bleaching that color out, my eyes were dark and dull compared to her impossibly bright near-neon pink ones, and she actually had something resembling a half-way healthy tan, which certainly hadn't described my looks at any time in recent memory.

Part of the package deal of being unhealthy, I supposed.

She also didn't have my wide-spread collection of scar tissue either, which was a small blessing for both of us. For me, because it spared me the opportunity to have a complete breakdown over being presented with a perfect mirror of myself at yet another a messed-up period of my tragic backstory, and her for the sake of simply not having to live through the shit that had left those marks in the first place.

But there was enough there that, even if this experience wasn't really like looking in a mirror, looking at her face had much of the same effect; a nearly hypnotic distraction of finding impossible similarities in an uncannily similar stranger.

"How's the tea?" Meryl asked, breaking the spell. There was a faintly anxious energy to her expression and posture, like she was trying to figure out if my staring was a sign I disapproved of her entire existence and defaulted to doing her very best not to be anything that could be seen as offensive.

I swallowed my current mouthful, waiting a moment for the light heat of it to pass down my throat before speaking. "Good. It's… good."

Smooth.

However clumsy my response was, it was apparently enough to calm Meryl down, the tension visibly running out of her shoulders as it was made clear that she wasn't in the shit for social misconduct.

"I-I didn't really think about what it would look like, bringing you here," she said as she took her own cup of tea in hand, idly turning the spoon around. "It makes sense, though. Waking up in a strange house without anyone around to tell you anything or any explanation for why you're there. That'd scare a lot of people."

"Not you?"

A twitch of that tension came back.

"I don't know. Maybe me too. Most of the time when I think about being kidnapped, it's usually not to like, a place that would have an actual bed," she said as she turned and started walking, pulling me behind her. There was something in her phrasing that almost made it sound like she had both firsthand experience with getting snatched and _opinions_ on my framing whatever she'd done for me as being anywhere near the same category. "But I guess that it depends on what the kidnapper would be after, I guess."

That was… probably a fair assessment, considering that I didn't really have any first-hand experience with being kidnapped.

"Could you tell me what happened?" I asked. For all she was familiar, for all that I knew I was responsible for her existence in some way, I didn't know her - it wasn't proper, wasn't appropriate, wasn't safe to hold her at anything but arm's length - even if she had given my tea. She wasn't a perfect stranger, but I couldn't treat her like a close friend either. "To me, I mean. Because the most I remember is being at home and then waking up here with some vague sense of lost time."

There was a moment's pause as Meryl rearranged herself, putting down her tea and fixing her sitting posture to something that reminded me of a child trained for recital.

"There's not to much to tell," she said. "I was out to sketch some birds… on Stonecutter - that's the island next door to Ravenser. It's quieter there - the pirates don't have a real use for it, most of the time. And I saw your boat floating along without anyone on deck, which didn't feel right, so I went to look and found you."

I recognized both of those names as my work, but not from Meryl's story. They had been from a story that I'd meant to set in West Blue that ultimately hadn't gone anywhere beyond brainstorming, and if I remembered right, there had been no connection between them in any form… and not much in the way of pirates on either.

Still, information was information and information was something I could use, especially if it wasn't falling into expected patterns.

"Is the boat still… around?" I asked, trying to spin the start of a plan out of the tangle.

If there was a boat, there could be clues. Resources. Stuff. _Something_.

Meryl shrugged. "I think it ran ashore pretty hard, but I don't know that much about that sort of thing, so I threw the anchor out just in case."

"Probably the right call, not that I'd know personally." The idea of throwing down an anchor for a grounded boat might have seemed a bit like shutting the barn doors after the horses were gone and back again, but tides were a thing, so…

"You don't know anything about sailing?"

"Not really. Don't like the water - can't stand being too close to too much of it," I confessed before drinking down the last of the tea. Past experience with drowning had taken the pleasure and comfort out of body of water bigger than a bathtub. "Probably why I don't remember much, if I was out on the open sea. Would have been too scared to think straight."

Probably too scared to do anything more than curl up and go catatonic for the duration, though if I was honest with myself, there would have been a lot worse things I could have done in that kind of situation.

"And you want to go back there?"

"Shouldn't be bad, if it's on the sand. That means it's stable, at least." The logic made sense in my head, even if said-head was getting a bit fuzzy around the edges now that the adrenaline from earlier had left my system. "And even if there aren't any clues, there still might be some stuff I can use - might even have my glasses."

Even if they were a bit chipped, at least they were better than trying to navigate half-blind through an unfamiliar world.

"Still," I said as I switched mental tracks off of 'momentary inconvenience' to actual plans. "Even outside of that, the fact remains that there might be something useful there. And if I can somehow move the boat somewhere safer, I might be able to do something else with it. Sell it or sail it, I don't know…"

"Oh."

A moment of awkward silence passed.

"Well, that's going to have to wait for you to get better."

I jerked back to full awareness. "What?"

"You were very sick when I got you out of the boat," Meryl said, putting down her tea. "I don't think you should be going out and exploring just yet. Ravenser might not be a… huge island, but it's still big enough that walking that distance isn't something you can simply just _do_ after being unconscious for over three days."

"But…" Dammit, I didn't have a good argument for that.

"I'll handle it. You rest."

I almost wanted to argue that I wasn't tired, but the vague fuzz around my head abruptly intensified into a fluffy vice-grip as I tried to force myself upright, my eyes suddenly turning off in a way that I'd previously associated with concussion.

Shit. Was this what fainting was like…?

* * *

Meryl looked up from the collapsed figure of her guest to her grandfather's looming figure, gnarled hands uncurling from where he'd gripped their head. "You didn't need to do that."

"Ah, but I am well acquainted with the type of person who has heard good advice and elected to ignore it regardless - well enough to recognize another of the stripe by tone alone," the old druid said as he pulled his hands back under his cloak. "I have simply spared you a fight in getting this one to rest."

That was probably true. Her guest - she still didn't have an actual name for them, did she? - seemed like they'd already had a course of action already plotted out as soon as Meryl had mentioned the boat… and had likely had been plotting something similar from the moment they'd woken up. The 'new' plan was probably just a further step of the escape she'd barely been able to stop earlier.

The idea stung a bit, but…

No, Meryl thought as she pulled a blanket over the sleeping form of her guest, it wasn't like she would have done otherwise if put in that kind of situation again. Most people couldn't rely on anyone else coming to rescue them, for a lot of different reasons. Just because Meryl hadn't been an enemy didn't make her an ally either, and one cup of tea couldn't be expected to change that.

Even if Meryl herself would have really preferred it so.

"Keep an eye on the house while I'm out, Garathair," she said as she pulled her shawl around her shoulders, getting ready to head back out into the winds of Ravenser Odd.

The bird mask dipped in acknowledgement. "Of course. Wouldn't want our guest wandering off."

Meryl gave one last look at her grandfather and her guest before closing the door behind her and beginning her walk.

The path Meryl usually took to Stonecutter required she cut close to Ravenspurn - actually, she probably was within the understood limits of the town, five minutes into the journey, even if the outskirts didn't have much going for them beyond being the dumping ground for most of anything the better-off residents didn't want or need anymore.

She didn't particularly like getting even this close, but it was safer than going through the heart of the place or attempting to go through the rougher forests of Ravenser. At least here, her only worries were -

The thought cut off as a large shadow crossed over her own, blotting out what little sun Meryl was getting. She looked up at the shadow's source, taking in the raggedly dressed tower of muscle and rubbery pale plucked-chicken pink skin without a blink.

"Hello, Pew," Meryl said, pointedly not sighing at being caught. Sighing would only make Pew even more insufferable.

The blind Fishman rattled off a series of squawking clicks that almost registered as a laugh - though maybe for dolphin Fishfolk, it was. "Young Dacey. It's been a while since you've been down to town, hasn't it? Young Zahlia was beginning to be worried and you know how Marshalsea feels about _that_."

And already, he'd started in on the pointed comments and the guilt.

"I prefer to keep to myself. That's nothing new."

"Hm. But the guest in your house is."

Her hands clenched involuntarily, the spark of annoyance a sudden hot coal in her chest. "I don't like being spied on, Pew."

"Is it really spying to keep an eye on the family of nakama no longer capable of doing such themselves?" Pew mused before clicking his tongue. "Ah, but that is a matter of semantics not worth arguing. The only question is when and where and how you picked up your latest stray."

"That's none of your business."

"You might find that it is, given what happened with the _last_ one."

Meryl broke eye-contact - or whatever passed for it with Pew. "This is different."

"Is it?"

" _Yes_ ," Meryl bit out. "They would have died without my help." Or something worse. She'd known enough pirates and enough ghosts to know that death was hardly the worst thing that could happen to a person, especially on this island.

"Hm. I suppose that is your prerogative," Pew replied, his tone careless with both his disregard for charity and his dismissal of Meryl's choice to partake in it. "Just as it is ours to see that you are kept… safe."

With that, the dolphin Fishman turned and slowly began to limp his way back in the direction of the town center - no doubt to go tell Marshalsea that he'd checked in and given all due warnings before going back about his own daily business. Probably something that involved breaking the legs of some unfortunate who didn't know the rule about avoiding the blind beggar.

"I do have a… favor to ask," she finally managed to say.

Pew stopped in place. "A favor."

One she was already beginning to regret asking for, but she already had to endure this much of the man. Might as well go in for the whole shebang and get something out of it. "Yes."

It could have been frightening, to see Pew - big, old Pew, who limped and didn't have eyes and could break things so easily - move so quickly, to go from standing over there to directly over her in less than a blink, but Meryl had known Pew for most of her life, which was more than enough time to know that he was both blindingly fast and very precise with the power held within his body.

Pew never broke anything he didn't mean to, after all.

"You _never_ ask for favors," he said, tone low and deadly serious as he leaned over her close enough for her to start mapping star charts across the freckles of his skin if she'd been so inclined.

Meryl might have mistaken that for an attempt at intimidating her, if she hadn't known Pew for most of her life. As it was… no, it was simply him being serious, dispensing with the pretension of 'friendly' he coated all of his interactions with.

"That's because I don't like owing you anything in return," she said. "But this is a situation that I do not have the ability to handle on my own."

"And that would be?"

"The person I rescued came in a ship. Some kind of sailboat. It's run ashore over on Stonecutter… and I need it brought to a safer port. Not," Meryl added quickly, "the main one."

"The Wheel," the Fishman replied, standing fully upright for the first time in the conversation. " _Well._ Not only just asking for favors but bringing strange ships into the old family territory. Must be a rather important guest, hm?"

Meryl Dacey did not answer the question. Instead, she asked one of her own; "Are you going to do it or not?"

Pew grinned, showing off a snout full of needle teeth, crooked and sharp. "Lead the way, young Dacey."

* * *

The walk was long; longer than what Meryl would have taken on her own for the sake of Pew's limp, and longer still for being taken in silence - well, _relative_ silence. Pew had seen fit to quiz Meryl along the way, always with questions that were just relevant enough that she couldn't brush them off.

'How big is the boat?' Roughly thirty feet long, and maybe ten across.

'How many were aboard?' Just the one.

'Did you throw down the anchor?' Yes, even though it had felt a little silly to do so after the ship had run into the beach.

'What colors was it flying when it arrived?' None at all.

The worst part was that he spaced them out in a way that made it impossible to string the exchange of words into a proper conversation. It was just 'question', 'answer', and then awkward silence until Pew decided to make noise again.

Meryl almost suspected he was doing it on purpose, simply for the pleasure of being irritating, but there was also the fact that Pew was methodical and logical, with a tendency to drag other people into his way of thinking because he had little tolerance for moving outside of his own way of doing things and even less inclination to adjust his habits for the comfort for another.

Still, she'd known Pew to be worse in the past, so perhaps this was a small mercy on part of her 'favor'. It didn't stop her from having a headache by the time they reached the boat, but it was worth noting.

Probably.

The ship looked almost the same as Meryl had left it on the beach, slightly crooked from how it had driven into the sane and a bit rougher from the additional days of neglect, but there was nothing that made her immediately suspicious.

The sand around it was smooth and undisturbed - at least, as undisturbed as it ever was on Stonecutter. There was plenty of evidence of visitation by birds and the passing of the tides, but there were no sign of people visiting. That wasn't to say it was impossible to have happened, as the tides would wipe out any tracks as regularly as clockwork, but it was proof that nobody had come within the last six hours.

Pew, not being able or interested in knowing such a detail - given that he probably had already detected the complete absence of sapient life in and around the immediate area -, was running his hands over the sides of the boat, feeling and tapping on the vessel as he made his way around it.

"Feels sound enough. Not detecting any significant flaws in the frame. Decent enough quality, for secondhand salvage." He clicked his tongue, apparently done - and not at all impressed - with his initial judgement. "Nothing I'd take out in Paradise, much less the New World, but fair enough for Blue waters."

"You don't need to sell the quality to me, Pew, it's not my boat."

"So you say." Pew hummed a little as he slid his fingers between the hull and the sand, his tone picking up a bit as he apparently found what he was looking for. "Should be a clean lift and return to sea. You want me to tow it?"

"Yes," Meryl replied. "I'm not good enough to get it in through the Wheel's arch. Not unless I'm manning a bird."

"Your aunts weren't much better in that regard. Least you Daceys know how to manage your wayfinding with your heads in the clouds," the Fishman muttered, before he turned to Meryl.

"Shall I lift you or can you move yourself?"

Meryl stretched her power down into her books and let her drawings melt up her arms and back - not to completion, she'd learned when working on this trick - before spreading the wings, feeling the stretch and strain of a dozen different sets lifting her off the sand and up high enough to step onto the deck of the sailboat.

It wasn't her best trick, but it was relatively quick and didn't require the space needed for a proper take-off.

"T'was more impressive when Enda and Brenda did it," Pew muttered as Meryl tucked the birds back into her sketchbooks, letting her power settle back into her bones to ache like an overworked muscle.

"You're no fair judge of what _anything_ looks like, Pew."

"Leastwise they were quicker about it. Even when they wanted to play at lovebirds."

Before Meryl could roll her eyes at Pew's dramatics, the Fishman tensed, made a little noise, and then pulled the ship out of the sand as easily as a normal person could have pulled a plum out of a pie; not just in the effortlessness of the action, but the delicacy required not to crush the prize into a fine pulp- or knock its passenger off - at any point in the process.

As Meryl worked on keeping her balance, Pew stepped out into the water, wading out until he was nearly up to his neck in the sea before setting the ship down in it and switching his grip to the anchor chain.

"Right. Been a while since I've had cause to swim this route, but I think I can manage. Collect anything that looks important while I handle the boat."

Right… Meryl bit her lip as a problem came to mind. "What would you say would be important enough to take with me?" she asked, poking her head over the edge to watch Pew.

Pew frowned as he wrapped the chain around his shoulders, apparently having not thought his directive the entire way through either. "Valuables, mostly. Anything that could not be replaced easily or would be difficult to live without. I suppose if you're concerned about the comfort of your guest, you could also get something that would attend to that - though what that might be in this case, I couldn't say. I'd say use your best judgement but…"

The Fishman let his sentence trail off teasingly, his mood apparently much improved for being in his natural element.

"I think I'll manage," Meryl shot back before slipping down into the interior of the boat.

Like she'd had assumed from looking at it from the outside, it didn't seem as if anyone else had bothered to investigate the boat yet… or if they had, they hadn't cared to try looting it. Nothing looked like it'd been kicked around worse than it had been in the first place and the 'valuables' - or at least, what Meryl assumed were valuables - still looked to be where she'd left them.

And that would hopefully include those glasses she'd remembered being somewhere around _here_ -

There was a small but sharp splintering crack underneath Meryl's shoe, a sound that she immediately recognized as 'wince-worthy'. Well, at least she'd remembered the location right, even if it was a little too late to be actually helpful.

"We're nearly to the arch - did you find what you were looking for?" Pew called from outside, as if he hadn't heard Meryl's mistake the instant it happened.

"N-not yet!" she replied, grimacing as she picked up the broken pieces - too small to have any hope of fixing them - and shoving them into what she hoped was a trash bin before turning her attention back to the task at hand.

There were… well, a lot of things for how small a space there was inside the ship.

Some of it was easy. A large duffle that looked to be full of clothes, crammed in without much regard as to wrinkles or effective packing, was all ready to go without any further action on Meryl's part beyond picking it up.

The rest? Much more difficult, and Meryl soon found herself guessing as to what was worth dragging along or not.

The shelves full of strange slender not-books and impenetrable doorstoppers could stay behind, the bedding as another thing that could be forgotten, a red scarf hung over a swinging door was practical enough to add to the bag of clothes, a guitar was a bit much to haul around but also bit too valuable to leave behind unguarded…

As Meryl found herself gently guilted by chipped green glass eyes into adding a well-loved stuffed animal to the pile of things to take along, a flicker of _presence_ behind her had her spinning on her heels to find the source.

In her experience, only a handful of ghosts felt like that - like a nameless pressure that could crush her from the inside out if they had the mind not to hold back -, but the only thing she found was a sword, sheathed and left to haphazardly lean in the corner instead of being held in a proper weapon stand.

Meryl bit her lip as she looked it over, mentally weighing her next choice.

A sword… swords were fairly valuable things, even without being decorated like this one. Even if the purple wrapping on this one's hilt and the complicated knot of the same material around the sheath was frayed to whisper softness - like the stuffed animal, it had been _loved,_ loved almost to the point of desperation, some intuitive thought insisted -, there were still marks of being important, even without the secondary sense of _weight_ hanging over it.

The much realer weight of the blade almost made Meryl, already somewhat unbalanced by all the other stuff she'd collected, trip when she moved to pick it up before she adjusted for it.

The nameless twig of a guest she and her grandfather had dragged into the house carried this thing around regularly? Well, it wouldn't have been the weirdest thing Meryl had ever seen or even heard of, considering Aunt Brenda had a set of wings attached to her shoulders her entire life, but she still had figured that her guest wasn't that much stronger than she was, after grabbing them at the door.

Or had that just been illness - or shock? - closing the distance?

Either way, the sword would go with, because if a guitar was too valuable to leave behind, an actual weapon - even without that bizarre sense of importance weighing it down - was even more so. It made juggling the whole mess of stuff a bit awkward, but a bit of careful arrangement and use of handy straps made Meryl fairly certain nothing was going to get dropped immediately.

"Alright, I think I have everything," she called out to Pew as she climbed back out onto the deck, just in time to see the sea arch that was the one entrance to the hidden dock area known to only a few as An Bran Rath - or the White Wheel, to those uncomfortable with the traditional language.

The 'White' was a bit of a misnomer at this point - at best, the stone dock was more of a dingy grey where it wasn't covered with crawling lichens and decomposing seaweed - but the Wheel itself was still round, even if some of the spokes had collapsed over the years and trapped the rotting remains of boats that would never sail again in their new tide pool prisons.

And, as Meryl could see, the stone path that would lead back to her home were still intact.

Pew pulled the sailboat to the best of the remaining docks, detangling himself from the anchor chain he'd used to tow it before taking some rope from the deck to moor the ship to the dock properly, his fingers performing the work deftly despite the curl of age.

"Right, that should hold it," he finally declared as he creaked upright. "Young Dacey, are you _absolutely_ certain-"

Pew's question petered out as he froze in place. If he'd had eyes, Meryl would have bet they would be staring at her in an expression of shock as she stepped out onto the dock with her mixed-up load.

"What… is _that_?" he finally got out.

"What is what?" Meryl lifted the shoulder that she'd slung the guitar over. "Oh - it's a guitar. Not really a 'necessary item', but I didn't think leaving it to rust would go over well-"

"No. Not that. The… the _thing_ on your other side, lower," Pew snapped, his teeth chattering in a way that didn't really strike as laughter anymore. Now, it simply sounded like _fear_ and that wasn't an emotion Meryl was finding that she particularly liked on Pew. "What is it?"

"It's just a sword-"

"There's nothing _'just'_ about that thing you have there. Give it here."

Meryl held out the sword and Pew took it gingerly, his huge hands curling slowly to hold the sheath - not firmly, but with a caution that implied the Fishman expected it to rear up and bite.

Somehow, Meryl wouldn't have been surprised if it did.

"Just so you know, that's not-"

"Young Dacey, there are three beings here that know that this blade isn't yours. I know it, you know it, and the sword knows it. The only ones that don't know it are those that see such things for their rarity alone. You need not explain that it isn't yours to give. I am only taking it to Marshalsea for _everyone's_ safety." The Fishman swallowed awkwardly, clicking his tongue the whole while in a way that read more as nervous tic rather than his usual sound of judgement. "Now, go back home. I need to… need to talk to Marshalsea about this."

Meryl watched Pew leave, the man almost managing a proper 'flee' save for the lack of speed brought on by his bad leg, and wondered again, just what kind of person she had brought into her home under the idea that she'd been doing the right thing.

* * *

"No, no, allow me to take the… quest rock to its final resting place," Ruith said, gently pushing Meryl's sleepwalking guest away from the door. "It's cold outside and you do not have suitable clothes."

"Hate bein' cold," the sleeper agreed muddily. "S'take good care of the rock?"

"I promise," the druid said seriously, taking the imaginary rock as it was handed to him. "Now let's get you back to bed. Certainly would be warmer than in here, yes?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the month and a half-delay on updating - I've been having a bit of a time irl and it was kind of hard figuring out the exact flow of this chapter. Mostly on account of Raine wanting to take over the narrative a bit with both sucking the story too far into her head and then wanting to explore various areas too early - trapping her with social convention (my idea) and knocking her out was ultimately the best solution.
> 
> Monica also pointed out something that I missed (given that Raine is basically me setting a version of myself loose in a fictional place) in chapter 1, and that was that Raine's internal monologue, thanks to being paranoid and anxious about the situation, came off as more than a little unlikeable when aimed at an undeserving target, which was another reason to make Meryl the focus character for another chapter - which gives Raine more time to calm down and, given that Pew is now on his way to rat to the mysterious Marshalsea, means that paranoia/anxiety can be focused on someone else.
> 
> Speaking of Pew… some facts about him!
> 
> 1\. He is based off of the character Blind Pew from Treasure Island.
> 
> 2\. Originally, he was just going to be a very unpleasant human, but then I thought about river dolphins and how they've evolved pretty much be blind thanks to the amount of silt around them and that happened.
> 
> 3\. I know dolphins aren't a fish, but the movie Dead End Adventure had an Orca Fishman so I felt comfortable making a tertiary character a Dolphin Fishman.
> 
> 4\. Pew's actual dolphin species is a bit ambiguous cause I started out with the baiji and ended up with the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin at Monica's suggestion (she's also the reason Pew is pink instead of a washed grey), but the specifics aren't super important beyond explaining 'why his snout + skin + fin look like that' and why he's blind in the first place.
> 
> Additional fun fact that has nothing to do with Pew - the sleepwalking at the end of the chapter is based on something that I supposedly did in real life. Unfortunately, my 'witness' has a tendency to weird but mundane dreams so there's no way to know for sure what actually happened.


End file.
